One of my favourite movies trilogies of all time is Back To The Future, filmed in the 1980’s and starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. You can all look up the series on Wikipedia, read the plot and the synopsis of all three movies if you want to. But I suggest that for this iconic movie series, you’d have to trust me on this if you haven’t seen it and go out and buy the DVD or Blu-Ray yourself, so that you could binge what I reckon is one of the most confronting and engaging movies series of all time- even to this day. This series is one of my favourites because of its warmth, heart, comradery, and the fact that it speaks about issues still prevalent today, such as trying to be a better version of ourselves that we were before, standing up for yourself and not letting others walk all over you, and being there for each other through thick and thin just like best friends Marty McFly and Doc Brown. If you want the cliff notes version- the story is about Marty who lives in Hill Valley in 1985, who after witnessing his scientist friend be gunned down and left for dead by terrorists, inadvertently travels back to 1955 in Doc’s time travel car that he created. There he accidently prevents his parents from meeting, and hence the premise of the first film was that Marty would try to get his parents back together all the while ensuring that he could convince Doc to make revisions on the time machine and get him back to the present and back to his life in 1985.

You know how sometimes you have a plan of what you want to do, and how you’re going to go about it, and then in the end, the plan is uprooted and everything changes in an instant? Maybe that’s how I felt leading up to this blog post that I’m embarking on right now. And if I am to be completely honest, I wasn’t planning on writing about this particular artist today. I had everything planned out- for the next few weeks in fact, and I knew what I was going to write about, and it wasn’t about Rebecca St. James. Nevertheless, God always has His ways of showing up in the 11th hour, in places that you know you may not necessarily expect Him to. And He did- and as I write about Rebecca’s music and how it has been instrumental in my own life, and how the music has shaped my own ethos, beliefs, way of life, and outlook on people in general, I am thankful to how God can even use the things that have impacted us in the past, to remind us indeed of the past, as we understand that the things that have got us from then to now, still impact us to this day, creeping in our everyday lives when we may not think they can. Rebecca’s music has been a blessing to my own life in the last decade and a half since I first heard her passionate vocals in the mid-2000s. An Australian from a big family who uprooted themselves in the early 1990s to settle in to living in America (and Rebecca then subsequently moved into CCM ministry at the early age of 17 in 1994!); Rebecca’s place in Christian music, as well as even music in general has shaped the 1990s and the 2000s in ways that even I know I can’t even fathom- her trademark voice, and her youthful and energetic demeanour is what drew me to her music in the first place, and is what continues to bring me back to her music time and time again as the years continue to roll on.